Reposted from The Flathead Beacon

A man suspected of starting several arson fires in the Pablo area is dead after barricading himself inside The People’s Center and setting it ablaze on Sunday, Sept. 6.

The body of Julian Michael Draper, 33, was discovered inside a back office at the museum, educational and community center owned and operated by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Firefighters arrived on the scene late Sunday evening unaware that anyone was inside the building and found Draper’s body when they broke out a window as part of their fire containment efforts.

It wasn’t immediately clear how Draper died. His body has been sent to the Montana State Crime Lab in Missoula for further analysis.

The People’s Center was constructed in the early 1990s to house cultural artifacts significant to the Salish, Kootenai and Pend d’Oreille tribes, and the fire destroyed a number of “irreplaceable” items, according to Shelly Fyant, the Chairwoman of the CSKT Tribal Council and a former director of The People’s Center.

“I was in shock. It’s so devastating,” Fyant said of her reaction when she first received the news. “That was my baby, you know? I feel like I birthed that center in between my two kids … it’s just so devastating to see all those years of work and collecting history and artifacts and family heirlooms (destroyed).”

Fyant and current director Marie Torosian said the fire appeared to have started in the back office area before spreading to a repository where a number of artifacts were burned, including historic photographs, Eagle-feathered bustles, bone-and-bead breastplates, beaded moccasins and vests, and a collection of beaded bags. Employees are just beginning the process of sorting through the damage and will be consulting with experts from around the state in an effort to preserve or restore as many damaged items as possible.

Torosian said she will be establishing an online fundraiser to assist in the preservation and restoration efforts that lie ahead.

“It’s my hope and my goal to take what we have left and try and rebuild a facility and open back up again and continue to do our work,” she said.

Not every area of the building burned, however, and the fire mostly spared the facility’s museum and educational center, preserving dozens of one-of-a-kind pieces that were on display, including a vest worn by Salish Chief Charlo that was donated just two years ago. Torosian said she and others were allowed in the building for the first time on Monday and that the sight of the museum and educational center still intact brought her to tears.

No determination has been made on the viability of the building itself, which Torosian described as a “sturdy structure” that nonetheless suffered major damage. Firefighters at one point used a bulldozer to break through a concrete exterior wall in order to gain entrance to the facility, something made more complicated by Draper’s efforts to barricade himself inside. Torosian and Lake County Sheriff Don Bell said Draper lived nearby but otherwise had no formal connection to the facility.

The fire Draper set was apparently the second he started on Sunday, according to Bell, who said Draper was seen running from a nearby storage shop that was set on fire shortly before the blaze at The People’s Center. Less than two weeks earlier, on Aug. 26, Draper was arrested and charged with arson after he ignited a small wild land fire near the former Plum Creek sawmill in Pablo, less than a block from Sunday’s fires. Draper was out on bond at the time of his death.

Bell said no clear motive for the fires has been discovered.

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Reposted from CNN

A woman barred from entering one of France's most prestigious art galleries apparently because she was wearing a low-cut dress has received an apology after sharing details of the incident on social media. 

The Musee d'Orsay in Paris tweeted its regrets after the woman, identified only as "Jeanne," also took to Twitter to accuse the museum -- home to some of the world's most famous nude paintings -- of "double standards."

Jeanne, who shared an image of herself taken on the same day, says she was initially denied entry while visiting Musee d'Orsay with a friend during a warm day in the French capital.

After questioning why she wasn't allowed inside, the museum's staff apparently pointed to her cleavage, leaving her "excruciatingly embarrassed."

"Arriving at the entrance of the museum, I don't have time to take out my ticket before the sight of my breasts and my appearance shocks an officer in charge of reservations," Jeanne writes of the female officer's reaction. 

"At this moment, I am still unaware of the fact that my cleavage has become the subject of this controversy."

Another officer, this time from security, eventually told her that she had broken the museum's rules.

Jeanne says staff told her that "rules were rules" and she would need to cover herself up before going inside. 

While the guidelines on the museum's website state that a visitor "wearing an outfit susceptible to disturbing the peace," can be denied entry, it doesn't specify what type of clothing would warrant this.

"I do not want to put on my jacket because I feel beaten, obliged, I am ashamed, I have the impression that everyone is looking at my breasts," she says.

At this point, the friend accompanying her pointed out that her midriff was on display and questioned why Jeanne was being singled out.

Jeanne says she eventually agreed to put her jacket on, and she and her friend were permitted to enter.

"Inside: paintings of naked women, sculptures of naked women, artists advocating as well as engaging," she continued, pointing out that many of the other visitors were also wearing skimpy clothing.

Jeanne went on to criticize the museum's staff for "discriminating on the basis of cleavage."

"I question the coherence with which the representatives of a national museum can prohibit access to knowledge and culture on the basis of an arbitrary judgment determining if the appearance of someone is decent," she says.

"I am not just my breasts, I am not just a body, your double standards will not be an obstacle to my access to culture and knowledge." 

In its apology, posted on Twitter, Musee d'Orsay said it had reached out to Jeanne. 

"We have taken note of an incident that occurred with a visitor during her visit to the Musée d'Orsay," it reads, before stating that the museum "profoundly regrets" what happened and has contacted the "concerned person" to apologize. 

Edouard Manet's "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe" and Gustave Courbet's "The Origin of the World" are among the many famous works depicting nudity that are on display at the museum.

CNN has contacted the Musee d'Orsay and Jeanne for comment.

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Reposted from Artnet News

When the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York reopened to members on August 27 after five months of closure, eager visitors with masks lined up on carefully marked social-distancing indicators outside the museum’s glass doors.

When one museum-goer in the lobby asked where visitors would get their temperatures taken, museum COO Amy Roth replied: “You already did.”

Thanks to a tripod-mounted thermal-imaging camera that scans visitors as they walk through the vestibule, those checks happen automatically.

And that’s just one of many new precautions that resulted from an unprecedented alliance of 25 New York cultural institutions across all five boroughs that formed make sense of how to reopen after the citywide museum shutdown in March.

“We knew there would be guidance from the government, but we didn’t know what that would be,” Roth tells Artnet News. 

What museums did know was that they would have to figure out some things for themselves. The government, for instance, was unlikely to weigh in on whether handing out audio-visual headsets would be okay in an era of extreme hygienic caution. 

The museums “determined that we were better served working together” to answer those and many other questions, Roth says, noting that the institutions were inspired by the way hospitals had begun to collaborate since the onset of the pandemic.

Many of the discussions revolved around how to develop uniform safety measures across the institutions, so that “visitors wouldn’t see a major difference between a visit to the Whitney, and say, MoMA, or the Queens Museum.” Differences, she says, “lead to doubt, and feelings of discomfort if the standard of care is different.”

The first museum task force meeting, which took place in April, had about 15 institutions participating, and grew from there. Weekly meetings are still held each Wednesday.

“It turns out reopening a museum is much harder than closing one,” says Laurel Britton, senior vice president of revenue and operations at the Met, which has been part of the task force from the start.

The Met also has its own internal task force of 12 that has been meeting each day for the past four months. That group came together to solve a host of related issues: Staff reentry, visitor reentry, and physical circulation. One of its first steps, in June, was to poll staff on everything from returning to the workplace, to commuting, to continuing to work from home.

“We found that many staff needed to be reassured we were going to open the building in as safe a manner as possible,” Britton says, noting that workers were fairly evenly split between those who were comfortable with returning, those who were not, and those who felt neutral about the issue. (Upon the Met’s reopening, one visitor experience employee told Artnet News they were feeling “a little uneasy,” but pleased that “so far the museum seems to be making the right choices,” while another New York museum staffer said they felt museums should remain closed.)

The bottom line? “Communicating with staff and doing it early, was critical,” Britton says.

The Met also had to deal with the logistics of signage. With a space of its size—at roughly 58,800 square feet, it’s the largest museum in the US—workers needed to place about 800 social-distancing reminders throughout the building.

But one big issue was keeping up with changing regulations. In July, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that museums would have to remain closed even as New York City entered the fourth phase of its reopening on the 20th of that month.

“All the goalposts kept moving,” Britton says. Throughout that time, the Met kept in touch with local and state officials. “The goal for us was never to pressure people to allow us to reopen, but to show them that we’re doing everything we can to meet the requirements for when we are given the green light,” Britton says.

On the museums’ opening days, one thing became crystal clear: The Whitney and the Met, two world-renowned institutions, were going to become local museums, at least for the time being. On its first day, the Met reported roughly 8,400 ticketed visitors—a far cry from the usual summer high of 25,000 visitors a day. The Met’s post-COVID capacity is capped at 14,000.

And perhaps not surprisingly, given all the travel restrictions, 80 percent of the visitors on opening weekend were from New York City. Pre-lockdown, roughly 70 percent of daily visitors came from outside the city.

The Whitney, meanwhile, drew 2,700 visitors over the five days of its member preview, and more than 500 on the first day. The museum is currently capped at 25 percent capacity.

The next step? Keep working at it, says Roth. The Whitney is now in touch with peer institutions looking to reopen in the weeks and months ahead.

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Reposted from The Art Newspaper

The Smithsonian Institution and the Parrish Art Museum confirmed today that they were among the hundreds of organisations potentially affected by a ransomware attack earlier this year on a third-party software company in South Carolina that logs their data regarding fundraising and donors. 

The hack on the systems of the software company, Blackbaud, gave an intruder access to information about donors and other constituents, including names, US addresses, phone numbers, summaries of donations and for some individuals, dates of birth, the Smithsonian says. The institution says it has begun notifying people linked to the Smithsonian whose information may have been accessible.

Previous news reports have identified other organisations whose data was potentially compromised as UK’s National Trust, Human Rights Watch, dozens of charities and universities in the UK and US, and the Corning Museum of Glass in New York. 

The Smithsonian emphasises that the incident did not result in the exposure of any credit card information, Social Security numbers or banking information, saying that it does not collect or store this type of data.

Blackbaud says that after discovering the attack on its systems in May, it paid the hacker or hackers the ransom demanded, which it did not disclose. “We have no reason to believe that any data went beyond the cybercriminal, was or will be misused; or will be disseminated or otherwise made available publicly,” the software company adds.

The Smithsonian says it was informed of the data breach on 16 July, just as other institutions were being alerted, and recently reached out to donors. “Based on the nature of the incident, Blackbaud assured us that any stolen data has been destroyed by the unknown actor and stated they do not believe any data was disseminated or otherwise made available publicly by the unknown actor,” the Smithsonian says. “We will continue to investigate to confirm Blackbaud’s assurances and better understand what occurred.”

The potential compromising of Smithsonian and Parrish Art Museum data was first reported by artnet News. Both the Smithsonian and the Parrish, in Water Mill, New York, subsequently confirmed the exposure of their data in emails to  The Art Newspaper.

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Reposted from Hyperallergic

It was a sentimental day for staff and visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York yesterday, August 27, when the museum opened its doors for the first time after long months of COVID-19 shutdown. With limited capacity, temperature checks, mandatory mask-wearing, a sea of hand sanitizing stations, and signage for social distancing at every corner, the museum welcomed back its art-starved members before reopening for all visitors Saturday, August 29. For those who might still hesitate to take the subway or bus to visit the Met, the museum will start offering a free bike valet service tomorrow.

“Isn’t this fabulous? It’s a return to sanity,” said Peggy Dodson, a Met member of five years who was pacing through the museum’s Great Hall, her eyes wide with excitement.

“I used to come here a couple of times a week on a normal basis just to decompress from everything in the city,” Dodson, who runs a media company in NYC, told Hyperallergic. “When the museum was shut down, I had been in agony. It was emotionally and mentally stressful.”

“The opening is a sign for me that there’s something solid under my feet,” Dodson added. “Now I feel I can go through the rest of the year.”

Dodson’s words were representative of the general atmosphere at the museum, which saw a steady stream of excited members coming through its doors between noon and 7pm yesterday.

“I saw some visitors bursting in cheers when they entered the museum,” Annie Bailis, a Senior Manager for Media Relations at the Met, told Hyperallergic. “We all feel emotional.”

Abiding by the state’s reopening regulations, the Met capped admission to 2,000 visitors per hour and 14,000 per day to allow for proper social distancing. Before entering the museum, visitors were directed to two tents on both sides of the Met’s main steps — now flanked by two huge banners by Yoko Ono that read “Dream Together” — where staff in face shields administered temperature checks.

Inside, movement throughout the museum’s 440 galleries was mostly free, except when entering Making The Met, 1870–2020, an exhibition for the museum’s 15oth anniversary, where capacity was limited. A long line of visitors trailed in front of the gallery.

Visitors can expect more changes as they return to the museum on Saturday. For example, restroom capacity is limited to three people at a time, and elevator capacity is limited to two, with priority for people with disabilities.

Inside Making the Met, Mitch Marois, a Broadway theater worker, was inspecting a portrait of a Victorian woman in a blue dress that closely matched with his blue-dyed hair.

“The Met is my happy place,” he said. “There’s something so comforting about this place. It feels like home.” Marois added that he needs this comforting feeling as his industry remains shut down. “Reopening theatres won’t be as simple,” he said.

Reopening the Met may not have been as “simple” as Marois said, but the museum’s 2.2 million square feet of galleries did allow for a safe distance from other visitors.

In the Modern and Contemporary Art wing, Paola Roa and Rick Garcia, two immigrants from Colombia, were visibly excited. The two were part of a group of English language students on a field trip with their tutor, Joel Nunez.

“I’m speechless,” said Roa. “I never thought I could find myself almost alone with the art at the Met.”

Roa and Garcia have both been living in New York for two years. They have plans to join universities in the city and start new careers.

A popular destination for many members was the new exhibition TheAmerican Struggle, featuring lesser-known works by the modernist painter Jacob Lawrence. The paintings and sketches on view come from Lawrence’s series Struggle: From the History of the American People(1954–56). Small in scale but monumental in style, the works mark historic episodes in American history, like McCarthyism and the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that called for the desegregation of public schools.

Photography’s Last Century, an exhibition that opened two days before the lockdown in March and was subsequently extended to November 30, was also bustling with visitors. The exhibition includes photographic works by Dora Maar, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy, Diane Arbus, and Cindy Sherman, among many others. They are part of a collection of 60 photographs gifted to the Met by Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee for the museum’s 150 anniversary.

Jane, a retired New Yorker from Queens, was taking a break on a bench in the Greek and Roman Art section when she told Hyperallergic: “I missed coming here. It’s been five and a half months with no culture. This is the first opportunity to look at something not associated with the virus.”

Queens was one of New York’s hardest-hit boroughs during the early months of the pandemic, and according to Jane, “It still is a hotspot.” But gesturing with her hand over her forehead, she said, “I’ve had up to here with this virus.”

The general consensus among the Met members who spoke with Hyperallergic is that they felt safe inside the museum. Fast to adapt to the “new normal,” they reported that as long as other visitors remained disciplined in maintaining social distancing and mask-wearing, the risk felt minor. Visiting the Met felt safer than daily activities like shopping at the local supermarket or riding the subway, according to some.

At the entrance to the museum, José Rivera, the Met’s Deputy Chief Security Officer, was overseeing this massive reopening operation with relative calm.

“Everybody seems to be complying with the social distancing rules and they’re all wearing their face coverings,” Rivera told Hyperallergic.

Rivera is one of the museum’s longest-serving guards. On Sunday, he will celebrate his 31st year at the museum. But this will also be his last year at the Met, as he accepted a voluntary retirement package offered to him by the museum during the last round of staff reductions.

Reflecting back on his years at the museum, he said, “We’ve had rough periods in the past, like the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Sandy, but nothing compares to what this pandemic has caused.”

An illustrator by training, Rivera said that he plans fo fully dedicate himself to his art after his retirement. Until then, he said that his main concern is to make the Met’s return to full activity “as seamless as possible.”

When asked if he encourages people to come to visit the museum, Rivera answered with a wink: “I want people to come back, just not all on the same day.”

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Reposted from AAM

When we talk about equity, diversity, and inclusion in museums, we have a usual list of groups we mention: Black and Indigenous people, other people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, unhoused people, socioeconomically disadvantaged people, and formerly incarcerated people. To be sure, all of these groups deserve equity and inclusion in our field, but I have noticed that one group is frequently left off the list: disabled people. This is a problem, given how woven people with disabilities are into the fabric of our nation. According to the CDC, 26 percent of Americans have a disability, and many more of us will experience at least a temporary disabling event in our lifetime, especially as we age.

Sometimes organizations will add “accessibility” into their initiatives and use the acronym DEAI, as AAM does, but this does not always result in inclusion of disabled staff or visitors. Especially in times of rapid change, such as the coronavirus pandemic, even the minimum requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) can be overlooked, as organizations and institutions simply forget about the participation of disabled staff and visitors.

During the pandemic, our field has done a tremendous job pivoting to online communication, but it has not always centered accessibility. For museum workers, the vast majority of webinars and online happy hours do not offer captions, making them inaccessible to those who are Deaf or hard of hearing. For audiences, many of the tours and applications hosting virtual content are incompatible with screen reader software, making them inaccessible to people who are blind or have low vision. These are basic, well-known accommodations which should be provided at the outset, yet the burden is still on disabled people to request them, often with great effort.

On the other hand, the digital pivot has also improved museum accessibility for some disabled visitors—those who could not have come to our institutions due to mobility disabilities or other health reasons, but can participate in online offerings. After the pandemic is over, will our institutions remember to include these visitors in their outreach efforts?

There is a good way to remember to center accessibility for disabled members of our community: hire more disabled people. But, unfortunately, the museum field has been as reluctant as the rest of American employers to do so—many disabled people struggle to find work in most sectors. While special appointing authorities for disabled workers exist for federal government positions, there is no such consideration at the vast majority of museums.

Even programs explicitly designed to increase diversity in museum hiring often leave out disabled people. One example came up at this year’s AAM Virtual Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo, on a panel about a museum’s diversity apprenticeship program. The museum did not include disability as one of the categories for applicants, and so received only one application from a self-identified disabled person—a hard-of-hearing applicant who was not selected for the program. In fact, the presenters stated that they had consulted with human resources to determine if disabled people could even do the work of a preparator—how could someone safely handle art if they were missing a hand, or receive instructions from behind if they were Deaf?

It is often able-bodied hiring teams’ lack of awareness or imagination that prevents disabled people from getting jobs in museums, not the disabilities themselves. Accommodations exist that make the work possible for a variety of disabilities—even if the employee has only one hand, or is Deaf—but if the people creating the program cannot imagine those accommodations, they will omit disabled candidates from consideration. For that reason, the disability community has used the phrase “Nothing About Us Without Us” since the 1990s to emphasize that empowering people with disabilities to make their own decisions (such as whether they are able to do a particular job or not) is an essential part of their full participation in their communities.

If we are to move into the future as a society, as DEAI efforts urge us to, museums must include disabled people in their hiring practices. If we do not achieve equity in our hiring practices, how can we achieve equity in our service to visitors? If we do not make accommodations for disabled employees in our workplaces and professional events, how can we make accommodations for our visitors?

Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, wrote in 2019 that museums have “enormously positive potential…to strengthen communities, make places better, and do things of many kinds for people.” If we are looking to the future—to new museum definitions, new roles in our communities, and new responsibilities to our visitors as a result of the pandemic—then “many kinds of people” must include everyone.

DEAI means everyone who is marginalized gets a seat at the table. If the table starts to feel overcrowded, we are responsible for adjusting the seats and making more space, until everyone who has been left out has the room they need—even if it’s for a mobility device, guide dog, interpreter, or any other accommodation.

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Reposted from Artnet News

Police raided an internet café and a private residence in Berlin last week as part of a high-profile investigation into a notorious jewelry heist in Dresden last year. The antique diamonds, deemed “priceless” due to their cultural significance, were taken from the city’s Green Vault in an audacious heist on November 25, and there have been few public developments in the case in the nine months since.

Dresden’s public prosecutor’s office ordered the raids on two residential and commercial premises in Berlin on September 2. Seven investigators from the “Epaulette” special commission—named after some of the stolen diamonds—searched an apartment and an internet café with support from three officers working in Berlin’s art crime squad and a hundred riot police.

The raids were carried out in connection with a man who has been selling mobile phone SIM cards registered with fictional personal information. Investigators suspect that the man, who has yet to be named publicly, either sold several SIM cards to the thieves directly or provided them to the internet café on Hermannstrasse in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood. The criminals communicated through the SIM cards to plan and carry out the heist. 

The prosecutor’s office tells Artnet News that there are no new suspects in the case, and that the SIM card salesman has not yet been listed as a suspect as it is unclear whether he knew how the SIM cards would be used.

Potential evidence including business documents, cell phones, and storage devices were confiscated during the searches, but the prosecutor’s office declined to share further developments in the case before this evidence has been carefully assessed.

“The prosecutor is still confident to find the suspects and to bring them to justice,” a spokesman for the Dresden office tells Artnet News. “The prosecutor is also confident to be able to recover the stolen jewelry.”

The investigation is ongoing with few hot leads since last November, when a group of intruders broke into the Green Vault, one of the largest collections of Baroque treasures in Europe, through a small window. They smashed the glass vitrines and made off with 10 pieces of diamond-encrusted jewelry that were so priceless they could not be insured. Officials are offering a €500,000 ($571,517) reward for information that leads to the recovery of the stolen items.

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Reposted from Info-Security Magazine

Cybercrime is growing at an “alarming pace” as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and is expected to accelerate even further, a new report from INTERPOL has found.

It revealed the extent to which cyber-criminals are taking advantage of the increasing reliance on digital technology over recent months. This includes the rapid shift to home working undertaken by many organizations, which has involved the deployment of remote systems and networks, often insecurely.

Based on feedback from member countries, INTERPOL said that during the COVID-19 period, there has been a particularly large increase in malicious domains (22%), malware/ransomware (36%), phishing scams/fraud (59%) and fake news (14%).

Threat actors have revised their usual online scams and phishing schemes so that they are COVID-themed, playing on people’s economic and health fears.

The report also found that cyber-criminals have significantly shifted their targets away from individuals and small businesses to major corporations, governments and critical infrastructure.

Jürgen Stock, INTERPOL secretary general, said: “Cyber-criminals are developing and boosting their attacks at an alarming pace, exploiting the fear and uncertainty caused by the unstable social and economic situation created by COVID-19.

“The increased online dependency for people around the world is also creating new opportunities, with many businesses and individuals not ensuring their cyber-defenses are up-to-date.”

The study added that “a further increase in cybercrime is highly likely in the future.” This is primarily due to vulnerabilities related to remote working, a continued focus on COVID-themed online scams and, if and when a vaccination becomes available, another spike in phishing related to medical products.

Responding to the findings, Brian Honan, CEO of BH Consulting, said: “The COVID-19 pandemic is providing criminals with many opportunities as outlined in the INTERPOL report. Indeed, many organizations may be at increased risk of ransomware attacks due to having opened up remote access solutions, such as VPNS, to support remote working.

“These remote access points may not be properly configured and secured or, due to IT teams operating remotely, may not have the latest patches installed. In addition, staff may have had to use their own personal devices from home to work remotely which in turn poses challenges from a security point of view with regards to how to ensure those devices are secure.”

Jonathan Miles, head of strategic intelligence and security research at Mimecast, added: “It is important that organizations migrate away from a ‘keeping the lights on’ mentality and prioritize cybersecurity, especially at a time when threats aimed at a dispersed workforce are increasing. Failing to do so can lead to issues such as organizational downtime, data loss and a negative impact on employee productivity.”

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Reposted from State of the Planet, Columbia University

With the peak of the hurricane season coming up and COVID-19 abundant in many hurricane-prone areas, the United States is poised to experience the collision of two major disasters. According to a study by scientists at Columbia University and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a large-scale hurricane evacuation would increase COVID-19 cases in both evacuees’ origin and destination counties. But directing evacuees to counties with low COVID-19 transmission rates rather than allowing evacuations to follow historical patterns would minimize the increase, according to the study.

The research is the first to quantify how hurricane evacuation may affect the number and spatial distribution of COVID-19 cases in the United States. It is awaiting publication in a peer-reviewed journal, but is posted on the medRxiv preprint server for health sciences.

“Directing evacuees to destinations with low virus activity and providing housing opportunities and resources that help maintain social distancing, encourage mask usage, and limiting opportunities for virus transmission will be essential,” said senior author Jeffrey Shaman, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Earth Institute, and director of the university’s Climate and Health Program.

“Many of the country’s most hurricane-prone states have recently experienced some of the highest COVID-19 growth rates in the nation,” said coauthor Kristy Dahl, a senior climate scientist at UCS. “In every scenario we analyzed, hurricane evacuations cause an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases. Minimizing that increase depends on getting people to destinations with low virus transmission rates and ensuring that those transmission rates stay low even when there’s an influx of evacuees.”

The researchers built a hypothetical evacuation scenario in which residents of Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe counties fled a Category 3 hurricane. Based on previous studies of evacuation compliance and behavior, the study assumed 2.3 million people would leave the four counties. Post-Hurricane Irma surveys were used to simulate where they would go. That information was then used in a national county-scale model of COVID-19 transmission to determine how many cases would result from the evacuations and where they would occur.

The study assumed that COVID-19 transmission rates in destination counties increased during the evacuation period not at all or by 10 percent or 20 percent, representing the levels of public health directives that were put in place in the counties and how well they were followed, as well as whether evacuees stayed with friends or family members, or in hotels or shelters.

Under the worst-case scenario the authors considered, if people followed historic evacuation patterns and virus transmission rates increased by 20 percent in their destination counties, there would be roughly 61,000 additional COVID-19 cases in the origin and destination counties combined.

Under the best-case scenario, if people instead evacuated to communities with low COVID-19 transmission rates and transmission rates did not increase in the destination counties, there could be as few as 9,100 additional cases resulting from the evacuation.

The scientists said they hope the study will help inform the work of emergency managers and other local decision makers, as well as federal and state agency staff as the hurricane season progresses.

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Reposted from Pinnacol Assurance

"In Colorado, there's no shirt, no shoes, no mask, no service," said Colorado Gov. Jared Polis when announcing the state's recent face mask order, designed to decrease coronavirus transmission.*

Most people will comply with the mandate for health and safety reasons, in order to combat Colorado's coronavirus cases. In fact, a July poll found that 95% of adults reported wearing a face mask in a public space over the past month, a sharp increase from the half who said so in April.

But what if your employees encounter people not wearing masks in the course of their work, especially as the heat rises? 

Here are three common scenarios where worker safety might be at risk, plus some tips to give your team for working safely and avoiding triggering a workers' comp claim.

In someone's house

Visiting someone's house can be disconcerting, as you don't know the extent of that person's commitment to hygiene and social distancing. Whether you're there to fix a leaky pipe or act as a caregiver, you could be risking your health if your client isn’t doing his or her part to prioritize worker safety.

Here is how to establish safe protocols when dealing with a client in his or her own home:

• Try to avert the problem by corresponding via text, email or phone before the appointment. Seek as much detail about the project as you can remotely so you lessen face-to-face interaction, but also use that communication as a chance to confirm your company's adherence to best practices for mitigating coronavirus transmission. For example, assure your client that you will be wearing a face mask and request that he or she does so, as well.

On a commercial job site

There have been a number of outbreaks of coronavirus on Colorado construction sites, and in at least one incident, it is believed inconsistent mask wearing caused the spread among workers. "They were working in an enclosed space, and we all get complacent," said Carrie Godes, a public health specialist at Garfield County Public Health, in an article in the Colorado Sun. "It's a good takeaway lesson for all of us in our work environment." 

Here are some tips for approaching mask wearing at a job site:

• As the supervisor, communicate frequently about the importance of mask wearing and other preventive measures. These reminders can hold more weight when coming from the top, thereby promoting a safety culture and avoiding workers' comp claims.
• Remember that other workers might have just forgotten to cover their faces. If you encounter someone who isn't following proper protocol to stem coronavirus transmission, ask him or her in a non-confrontational, friendly manner to put on a mask.
  

In your own retail store, restaurant or office

We've all seen the videos and heard the stories of customers’ outright refusals to wear a mask, and sometimes even threatening employees who ask them to comply. There's never a reason to sacrifice your safety and some customers may even have a medical exemption, but commonsense appeals should work with most visitors.

Here are some tips for encouraging visitors to wear masks:

• Provide visual cues that you expect customers to wear masks. For example, post signs on the front door and make sure all employees are wearing masks.
• Position a greeter at the door to help direct visitors and pleasantly remind them to don a mask. Thank them for complying and emphasize that everyone wearing a mask will help keep establishments open for all.
• Offer non-medical masks for customers who don't bring one. 
• ‍Call 3-1-1 if you need additional help. 

*Regulations vary by state. Yours may be different. 

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